Wednesday, February 11, 2009

I just heard yet another professional offendee on Radio 4 complaining about the portrayal of women in recent films - Bride Wars etc.. I didn't catch her name, I didn't want to. She said she felt insulted by shopaholic, airhead, man-grabbing heroines. Oddly enough, I don't feel insulted by the drunken, dopehead, puking, fat, idle heroes of recent bad boy movies - in fact, part of me identifies with them, they certainly make me laugh. This is because I am just honest enough not to be a professional offendee and just sane enough not to identify myself as a member of a sexual tribe. But, if we are playing this game, let us demand a survey of 'negative gender stereotypes' in all the movies of the past 20 years. Actually, don't bother, I know the result - 90% negative male portrayals and 10 per cent negative female.

The hopeless man, no more worldly than a child, wandering wonderingly into a supermarket as if it were some sort of alien spacecraft and buying The Wrong Thing is a critical motif for advertisers.

If we take that away from them, all they'll have left is their Other Idea. (This, of course, is the conceit of the man dressed as a giant cigarette/muffin/glass of wine/coldsore chasing the subject around the streets until she defeats this personification of the Problem by making use of the Product.)

Men will think they've been most negatively portrayed and women will think they've been most negatively portrayed. We're all biased and so all of our opinions on this are effectively void...It's felt especially keenly by those of us who don't fit into the stereotypes whatsoever (which actually is probably almost everyone). Though Philip I don't agree that it's a woman's world in the west - just look at all the boardrooms, positions of power, wealth lists, pay etc. Still very much a man's world.

Most adverts on tv use beautiful women and men to sell products. People as meat. Beauty without soul. Empty pouting faces. Wish the world wasn't like this. This is negative for both men and women. Everyone wants to be loved for who they are, not what they look like or for what they do.

I agree with your post, Bryan, but not with some of your commenters, who seem a touch mysoginistic.The kind of thing that women of intelligence and discernment DO get cross about, and correctly so, are things like the fact that there has never been a female president of the Royal Society, whereas there have been several hundred men. I think approximately one British woman has ever won a Nobel prize for a scientific subject (Dorothy Hodgkin). This type of inexcusable prejudice IS worth getting cross about.

Given that my love for women is entirely blind I have nothing to say on that part. On the general offendee problem I think there's a much more important example today in Lord Ahmed and allies and the decision not to allow Geert Wilders into the UK. Fitna is indeed horrible to watch. But it makes a crucial point: islamist mass murder is everywhere justified as based on the Koran. That is not Wilders' fault. He chose only graphically to confront us with it. To take this as anti-Muslim is to concede that the worst murderers are indeed true Muslims, that their actions are indeed based on the Koran, as they claim, and rightly so. It's a dreadful decision to exclude him from the UK.

There's not much drole to say but Mark Steyn managed to find it in April last year: ... while Muslim immigrants may not have assimilated to Western culture, when it comes to exploiting the culture of victimology now embraced within the legal systems of the U.S. and other free nations, "they are superbly assimilated."

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.